Dan Petrellahttps://danpetrella.wordpress.com
JOURNALIST, WRITER, EDITOR AND RESEARCHERTue, 20 Mar 2018 02:18:26 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngDan Petrellahttps://danpetrella.wordpress.com
Being there: David Finkel on the importance of showing uphttps://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/being-there-david-finkel-on-the-importance-of-showing-up/
https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/being-there-david-finkel-on-the-importance-of-showing-up/#respondFri, 16 Mar 2012 16:53:38 +0000http://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/being-there-david-finkel-on-the-importance-of-showing-up/Continue reading →]]>It’s a tenet of reporting so basic that it was right there on the syllabus for “Introduction to Journalism” when I was a teaching assistant at the University of Illinois: “The most important thing a journalist can do is show up.”

In a time when technology makes it possible to gather information from great distances — for instance, using Twitter to monitor messages coming out of volatile countries or Google Street View to explore a far-off city without getting on a plane — it’s a lesson that bears repeating. Nearly every story will be better if the reporter goes to where the action is taking place.

The focus of the talk was Finkel’s 2009 book “The Good Soldiers,” a ground-level account of the 2007 troop surge in one of the most dangerous areas of Baghdad. At the time, Finkel said, there were already “great macro, big-picture journalism done on the war,” along with soldier memoirs that were beginning to be published.

“There hadn’t been, in this war at that point, the third-person journalist at some distance, going in, not to chronicle the big picture, but to chronicle the far end of policy: what was happening on the ground,” he said. “Very simple idea. I wanted to go, and I wanted to write a book about what happens to a battalion, really, of 19-, 20-, 21-year-olds when they’re sent into a war that was widely acknowledged to have arrived at its lost moment.”

(To get a sense of what life was like for the soldiers, see the video below, narrated by Finkel.)

This type of narrative journalism requires a level of detail that is practically impossible to recreate after the fact. The best way to bring the story to life for readers is for the reporter to observe it firsthand. To write “The Good Soldiers,” Finkel spent between eight and nine months in Baghdad with the infantrymen he was covering.

By being there, riding along on patrols in their Humvees, he was able to observe the way the men stood with their legs staggered and their hands tucked into their body armor in hopes of sparing limbs and appendages if an explosively formed penetrator, or EFP, were to tear through their heavily armored vehicle.

Finkel was there with Staff Sgt. Adam Schumann, one of the battalion’s best soldiers, as he waited to be choppered out of the war zone. When Schumann carried a fellow soldier, who was shot by a sniper, down from a rooftop, the man’s blood kept dripping into Schumann’s mouth. Six months later, he could still taste the blood, and, midway through his third tour of duty, he couldn’t take it anymore. (Finkel is now working on a book following the lives of Schumann and others after returning from the war.)

While the book tells the story of one group of soldiers in one part of Baghdad during one phase of a long war, it touches on larger themes through that specificity.

“It’s just a chronicle of what happens on the ground; it’s nothing more,” Finkel said. “It’s not a book so much about the Iraq War, but it’s using the Iraq War to write about war, what war does to the soul of a man. … It’s a very simple book.”

Creating a work of journalism that arrives at such universal themes through rigorous, detailed reporting and narrative storytelling isn’t an easy feat. It requires months — if not years — of work. In Finkel’s case, it meant traveling around a war zone armed with notebooks, a camera and a digital audio recorder.

But the first step is very simple: “This kind of journalism requires going, first of all. You go. And you work like a photographer. You try to get to the center of the thing. And then you stay. And you stay and stay and stay.”

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]]>https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/being-there-david-finkel-on-the-importance-of-showing-up/feed/0danpetrellaImageScience journalism site is an open (note)bookhttps://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/science-journalism-site-is-an-open-notebook/
https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/science-journalism-site-is-an-open-notebook/#respondWed, 26 Oct 2011 02:48:52 +0000http://danpetrella.wordpress.com/?p=372Continue reading →]]>For a freelance journalist, there are few experiences more nerve-racking than crafting a query letter to pitch a story to an editor.

You’ve devoted time and energy to researching an idea that excites you, and now seeing that idea become a published story depends your ability to communicate it succinctly in a way that will appeal to the personal preferences of someone you’ve never met. (This is especially true for those who are just starting out and have few established contacts in the industry.)

Thanks to the email listserv of a professional organization to which I belong, I came across a resource that will help demystify the process for freelancers like me, especially those who are interested in science journalism.

Journalism has a reputation for being a hyper-competitive field. And, while this competitiveness can be an important motivator for all of us to do our best work, it’s also great to see experienced, successful writers willing to share what they could hold as closely guarded trade secrets.

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]]>https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/science-journalism-site-is-an-open-notebook/feed/0danpetrellaA word from the authorhttps://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/a-word-from-the-author/
https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/a-word-from-the-author/#respondSun, 18 Sep 2011 00:09:34 +0000http://danpetrella.wordpress.com/?p=353Continue reading →]]>In my review of Robert S. Boynton’s 2005 book “The New New Journalism” last week, I ended on a question I was left with after finishing the book: “In today’s changing media environment, how does a young writer who aspires to do this kind of journalism find a viable outlet for his or her work?”

Much to my delight, after I shared the post on my Facebook page, Boynton himself responded with something that – at least in part – answers that question and also offers his views on where journalism is headed.

“It is important to remember that, however imperiled journalists feel, the big story is the fact that never before have so many people had so much access to such a diverse and enormous supply of information. And never before have they consumed so much of it. This is undeniably true, and of great benefit to mankind. The audience for journalism has never been larger.”

Boynton writes that it was the “laziness of the business model” of journalism that has created many of the problems the industry faces today. Because advertising revenue was rolling in so steadily for most of the 20th century, newspapers and broadcast news outlets allowed their actual product – their journalism – to be devalued.

After telling readers that he cautions his New York University students about trusting those who believe they can foresee the future of industry, he shares his own prediction: “In the future, journalism will be either very short, or very long. Nothing in the middle will survive.”

The survival of both short- and long-form journalism will depend not on building the largest possible audience, but on engaging loyal readers more deeply by providing them with an experience that is designed around their needs and that they will be willing to pay for.

He writes: “Short, disengaged readers need to get their basic news as efficiently as possible, and they will pay for that privilege. Long, engaged readers must be made as comfortable as possible so that they might luxuriate in the journalism they love. And they, too, will pay for the privilege.”

Aside from his theories about the future, Boynton also shares a message he gives to his new NYU students each year:

“… the first thing I do is welcome them to the house of journalism. It is a big house, I explain, with many differently shaped and designed rooms. The rooms have names like ‘blog post,’ ‘feature,’ ‘essay,’ ‘foreign report’ and ‘book,’ and seems to add a room or two every year. In order to have a long and enjoyable career, I continue, they must find one room they truly love, and decorate and design it so that it reflects their very best attributes. In addition, they need to find a few other rooms where they feel comfortable, since one can’t live in a single room forever.

In his own work, he explains, he did several types of reporting and writing for various reasons and at various levels of pay to help sustain himself and further his career. He writes:

“My wanderings through the house of journalism was made easier by my inexpensive, tiny apartment. But it was made possible by the fact that I paid each room its due. I didn’t expect to live off of book reviews and essays, and I didn’t take on only the best-paying assignments. I mixed it up as much as I could, and I would argue that those trying to meet the economic challenges to journalism must try to as well.”

While Boynton offers this as a way to address the challenges facing the journalism industry, I also found it to be a comforting piece of career advice.

As someone who aspires to do the kind of in-depth reporting and writing highlighted in “The New New Journalism,” I’ve indentified the “one room [I] truly love.” And while I haven’t been able to spend as much time as I’d like in that room thus far in my career, I’ve also found a few other rooms I’m quite comfortable in through my newspaper experience, work for CU-CitizenAccess.org, freelance writing for Illinois Alumni and other magazines, and my various multimedia projects, including online mapping, videos and audio stories.

While I sometimes worry that my career has lacked a narrow focus or direction, Boynton’s essay gives me the confidence that my eclectic interior decorating will help me continue to make my home in journalism.

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]]>https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/a-word-from-the-author/feed/0danpetrellaBook Review: “The New New Journalism” by Robert S. Boyntonhttps://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/book-review-the-new-new-journalism-by-robert-s-boynton/
https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/book-review-the-new-new-journalism-by-robert-s-boynton/#commentsSat, 10 Sep 2011 18:07:50 +0000http://danpetrella.wordpress.com/?p=327Continue reading →]]>When I was a journalism teaching assistant at the University of Illinois, I signed up for a seminar called Writing Across the Curriculum, which was designed to help teaching assistants incorporate writing into their classes in more meaningful ways.

During the two-day workshop, one of the activities involved each participant drawing a sort of comic strip describing his or her writing process. Up to that point, despite holding degrees in creative writing and journalism, and having worked as a newspaper reporter for a few years, I had never really given much thought to the individual steps by which I gathered information and turned it into a piece of written work.

As we went around the room and shared our drawings, it was evident that the writing process is incredibly idiosyncratic. It didn’t just vary among academic disciplines but also from each individual writer to the next. Some people’s processes included breaks to go for a jog or to do the dishes. So, while some wrote more efficiently than others, there was no single right way to approach the task.

One of the beauties of Robert S. Boynton’s “The New New Journalism” (Vintage Books, 2005) is that it shows that this phenomenon is not exclusive to a group of a few dozen graduate students at a Midwestern research university.

Boynton is an accomplished journalist and director of New York University’s magazine journalism program. A similar realization about the uniqueness of each writer’s process was the impetus for the book. Rather than simply teaching his own methods, Boynton also invited other writers to come speak to his classes about their work and processes. These conversations evolved into the book.

Through interviews with 19 of “American’s best nonfiction writers,” as the book’s subtitle dubs them, Boynton reveals the very different ways in which each writer finds story ideas, conducts research and interviews, organizes the gathered information, and, finally, crafts a narrative.

In writing her New Yorker pieces about “anonymous, marginal characters; and powerful politicians who are at the center of their world,” Jane Kramer goes “into a frenzy of cooking” as she works out a story’s opening.

Boynton’s enlightening introductory essay distinguishes the current breed of literary journalists from the New Journalism championed by Tom Wolfe, of whom the author is quite critical. The introduction traces the roots of the genre back past Wolfe and his contemporaries, writing, “Although indebted to the experimentalism of Wolfe’s New Journalism, the New New Journalist should also be understood as a movement that rehabilitates important aspects of its nineteenth-century predecessors.” Boynton also argues for this style of writing as a distinctly American form.

While tackling some overarching questions about the genre in the introduction, one of the book’s greatest strengths is its balance between the philosophical and the technical. Each section offers a brief biographical introduction to a particular writer and his or her work, followed by a conversation in question-and-answer format.

On the technical side, readers learn things such as whether a writer does extensive research before beginning interviews, like Ron Rosenbaum, or prefers to go in cold, like Susan Orlean. Surprisingly, one of the most disputed issues among the writers seems to be the role of the tape recorder in the reporting process. Jon Krakauer says, “I don’t understand journalists who don’t record their interviews. On the other hand, Lawrence Weschler believes “the tape recorder falsifies the situation” because sources sometimes say the best things when the tape recorder is shut off and because facial expressions and other “communication events” are not recorded in interview transcripts.

Among the philosophical topics, the writers are asked about how they handle ethical dilemmas they face in reporting and what they believe are the prospects for this type of work in the future. Perhaps the most interesting question posed to each is whether they believe the type of work they do can lead to truth, which elicits many thoughtful discussions on the nature of truth itself.

“The New New Journalism” is an invaluable resource for those who aspire to write narrative nonfiction. It not only serves as an introduction to some of the best voices currently working in the genre, but it also offers a wealth of ideas on how to take a story from its initial idea form to a finished narrative.

There is, perhaps, one important question Boynton’s book does not answer: In today’s changing media environment, how does a young writer who aspires to do this kind of journalism find a viable outlet for his or her work?

In a piece for The New Yorker last year, Evan Osnos, who has been the magazine’s China correspondent since 2008, wrote about a leader who rose through the ranks of the political party that has dominated his city for the better part of the past century to assume a position of power once held by his father. But the story’s subject isn’t a Communist Party boss. He is Richard M. Daley,whose sixth term as the Democratic mayor of Chicago ends Monday. Osnos’ profile offers rare insight into the life of a man who is well known for his contentious relationship with the press. “The Daley Show” appeared in the magazine on March 8, 2010, before Daley announced that he did not intend to seek re-election.

Osnos has been familiar with Daley since he interned at the Chicago Tribune while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. “He struck me as a fairly unique American political figure,” the writer said. Around the time of Barack Obama’s historic election, Osnos, who came to The New Yorker from the Tribune’s Beijing bureau, pitched a story to the magazine‘s editors about the man who wields seemingly unchecked power in the new president’s political training grounds. The editors were very supportive of the idea. “They were interested in understanding, ‘Who was the guy who controlled the city that produced Obama?'” Osnos said.

To do the story, Osnos knew he would need to spend a lot of time with the mayor. Given Daley’s fiery attitude toward reporters this could have been an insurmountable obstacle. “For a New Yorker piece of this kind, you need to have a lot of access,” he said. “I wasn’t going to do the story unless I knew I was going to have access to Daley to interview him repeatedly.” He approached Jacquelyn Heard, the mayor’s press secretary, with the idea in early 2009. While the administration had the “usual level of concern” expected from any political operation, Osnos was guaranteed the time he needed with the mayor.

Before going into interviews for a story of this kind, Osnos feels it is necessary to do as much background research as possible. “I think that’s absolutely vital to having a productive interview,” he said. “You never manage to read everything, of course,” he said. In “The Daley Show,” contemporaneous scenes of Daley surveying the city from his town car and attending public events are interwoven with background details that reflect deep reservoirs of research material. In the story’s lead section, Osnos quotes The Wall Street Journal‘s description of Chicago as “Beirut on the Lake;” a former campaign consultant’s assertion that “Daley had a tendency to misstate the obvious, invent words never imagined by linguistic researchers, introduce irrelevant material, and demonstrate anger at seemingly uneventful moments;” and the legendary Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko’s quip that the mayor “had ‘all the charisma of a plate of corned beef and cabbage.'”

Armed with this kind of factual material, Osnos goes into interviews prepared make them productive conversations rather than allowing his subject to spout platitudes and political speak. This is especially important with someone like Daley. “He goes into a kind of autopilot when he’s doing interviews, and that’s kind of, from an interviewer’s perspective, a disaster,” Osnos said. Osnos’ research allows him to push interviews in new directions. “The only way I can have an interview that pushes my knowledge beyond what is already publicly available is know what is already publicly available,” he said.

For this story, Osnos conducted three formal sit-down interviews with Daley, each lasting about an hour to an hour and a half. While these sessions gave him time to check facts with the mayor and get his take on some of the myths surrounding his life and his 20-year tenure in City Hall, they weren’t as crucial to the final story as one might assume. “The interviews with him weren’t vital to the piece,” Osnos said. And they certainly didn’t produce a plethora of compelling quotes. “He’s in a constant struggle with his own tongue,” he said.

Although the interviews with Daley weren’t very productive, Osnos spent a lot of time interviewing other people for the story. Beginning in April 2009, he started interviewing people around Chicago about the mayor. In all, he interviewed about 50 people for the story, which he said is on the low end for a story of this kind. With a subject like Daley, about whom so much has been written, Osnos relies more heavily on his background research. For example, Osnos quotes “American Pharaoh,” Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor’s 2000 biography of the mayor’s father, rather than quoting the authors from interviews. He has found that most of the useful material writers can contribute is contained in their work, although he’ll sometimes interview them if they can offer information that doesn’t appear in print, as he did with Taylor.

When it comes to selecting who to interview for a major profile, he tries to find people who can offer readers unique insight about the subject. Osnos could have talked with Bill Clinton for the story, for instance, but he didn’t feel the former president would be able to shed any new light on Daley’s character. He did talk to Al Gore, however, because the former vice president is more intimately familiar with the mayor’s environmental efforts. One noticeably absent source, given the framing of the story as an in-depth look at the man who runs the show in Obama’s hometown, is the president himself. Osnos knew, if he kept at it long enough, he might get a few minutes of the president’s time, but felt it wasn’t worth the effort to add “a little stardust” and not much detail to the story. Instead, he focused his attention on interviewing Daley’s family, schoolmates, political observers, staffers, former campaign workers and political opponents, among others. “In a story like this, it’s almost better to get the guy’s first-grade teacher than it is to get the president,” he said.

Osnos didn’t just spend time interviewing Daley. He also was granted access to follow the mayor about his daily business, which provided the contemporaneous action for the story. While observing a subject in action, Osnos is constantly recording on a digital audio recorder. “I think that’s especially important with (Daley) because he speaks in odd ways, so you have to capture his speech exactly how he said it,” he said. At the same time, he uses his written notes to capture physical details, gestures and facial expressions that don’t show up on the recordings. He then pairs the two to craft scenes with vivid physical detail and accurate dialogue.

This scene from early in the story is an example of this method at work:

Shortly after talking to (New York City Mayor Michael) Bloomberg, Daley was at a table with officials of the Department of Streets and Sanitation. … He flipped through a briefing packet, past sections on alley sweeping and street lights, and lingered on “Rodent Control.” “What about Dunkin’ Donuts?” he asked, referring to a recent case.

“Fly infestation,” the rodent-control boss said.

“Who is the head of Dunkin’ Donuts?” Daley demanded, his voice squeaking. “Why don‘t we send a letter to the president, and—who owns these?” he asked, of the local franchises. “Do we know who owns these? Absentee landlord?”

He scoured the pages before him and landed on another case—more flies, this time in a Starbucks at the airport. “Send a letter to Starbucks!” he said, poking the air with his half-glasses. “To the chairman of the board!”

If it weren’t for Osnos’ diligent recording and note taking, he wouldn’t have been able to capture the way Daley’s voice squeaked when he asked about the head of Dunkin’ Donuts or how he jabbed the air with his glasses when he gave the orders to send a letter to the head of Starbucks. Using only one method of observing the moment, Osnos would be able to paint only half the picture.

Osnos supplements his notes and recordings by taking photographs with a small digital camera. While riding in Daley’s town car on the way to a gun turn-in event, for example, he was able to take photos out the window of the car. “It allows you to get a level of detail you wouldn‘t be able to get just by writing things down in the moment,” he said.

After gathering as much detail as possible during the reporting, Osnos must decide how to shape the story from all his raw material. Before he starts writing, he and his research assistants transcribe all his audio recordings. He needs to have everything on the page so he knows what he has to work with, he said. After the transcripts are complete, he starts filling information into an extensive outline, which contains large chunks of the transcripts, observations from his notebooks and material from his background research. For this story, he worked from a 180-page outline, only small portions of which made it into the final version.

In deciding what goes into a story, Osnos applies a simple principle: “Every sentence in the story has to do work. It has to accomplish something. It has to take you from one place to another.” This often means scenes that may have seemed important during the reporting process end up on the cutting-room floor. Around Christmas, Osnos accompanied Daley on his annual trip to a hospital to visit the parents of seriously ill children. Because one of Daley’s own sons, who was born with spina bifida, died before his third birthday, this could have made for a compelling vignette – the kind Daley’s press people would have loved to see in the story, as Osnos observed. But it didn‘t work. “He wasn’t particularly expressive or comfortable,” Osnos said. “I don’t have a requirement to put anything in. That’s the prerogative of the writer: You choose the things that you think do the most work in the right direction.”

When he sits down to start writing, he typically starts somewhere in the middle of the story, often with a section of biographical detail he knows he has nailed down. He‘s found that starting from the beginning isn’t productive for him. “If you start with the lead, you’ll struggle and struggle with the nut graph, and, often, you’ll end up with no nut graph,” he said. During the writing process, he usually works from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., although he said he isn’t very productive by the end of the day. He spent about four weeks writing this story.

Osnos writes in sections, then stitches the sections together and whittles them down until his story is the appropriate length. A section in this story about the allegations of police torture under the supervision of Detective John Birge, which began while Daley was Cook County state’s attorney, started out at about 3,000 words, but it is only about 700 words in the final version. He feels he needs to see all the related details and quotes next to each other before he can decide how they fit together. “There’s a weird sensation that comes with that because you don‘t want to cut anything,” he said. As he cuts material from the story, he places it in a secondary file, which he reviews to make sure he hasn’t eliminated anything crucial before turning the story over to his editors.

In writing about Daley for The New Yorker’s national audience, Osnos had to frame the story differently than he would have if he’d written it while working at the Tribune. A Chicago audience would be more concerned with the current troubles plaguing Daley’s administration, but most of the magazine’s readers “still think about the current Mayor Daley as the new guy,” he said. “The responsibility is to them is to give them the story that gives them a full portrait rather than just the breaking news.”

Although Osnos weaves contemporary scenes into the story, the bulk the narrative focuses on the historical, biographical detail of Daley’s emergence from this father’s long shadow to forge his own legacy, one that has erased several things his father left behind, such as high-rise housing projects. “For a lot of people, the father’s name, Richard J. Daley, is about as iconic as you can get,” Osnos said. To bring the story back to Daley’s relationship with his father and his father’s legacy, Osnos decided to end with a scene in which a high school student visiting City Hall asks the mayor how he got where he is today. “For a moment,” Osnos writes, “Daley looked stumped. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘my dad was the mayor from 1955 to 1976.'” The story shows the many ways in which the mayor has become his own man, but Osnos ends on a note that places his life in the larger context of the Daley dynasty.

]]>https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/behind-the-scenes-of-the-daley-show/feed/1danpetrellaPhoto by Kate Gardiner, used under Creative Commons license Welcome!https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/welcome/
https://danpetrella.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/welcome/#respondSun, 16 Jan 2011 22:58:22 +0000http://danpetrella.wordpress.com/?p=164Continue reading →]]>One of my goals for the new year was to set up a website to display my professional work, and — amazingly — I managed to get it done. And in January, no less!

In addition to showcasing my writing and multimedia work, I plan to use the blog on this site to provide updates on my career and share thoughts and tips about journalism.

If you want to see some things I’ve done recently, check out my clips. For a more complete overview of my experience, please take a look at my résumé. And if you want to get in touch, you can find me on Twitter.